George
Kegebein (left) checks the fuel on the Boeing 307 Stratoliner at Allegheny
County Airport. Crew chief Nate Andrews of Seattle (right) performs pre-flight
checks on the Boeing 307 Stratoliner during its stay at Allegheny County
Airport.

Thursday, August
7, 2003

Vintage
Boeing Stratoliner embarks on its final voyage from Allegheny County Airport

By Ann Belser Post-Gazette Staff Writer

It seems sweetly appropriate
that the final takeoff in the life of the Boeing 307 Stratoliner was from
the Allegheny County Airport, which was built in the same era as the plane
and with the same art deco sensibilities.

The plane was on its
way to the Smithsonian Institutes Steven F. UdvarHazy Center
at the Dulles International Airport annex of the National Air and Space
Museum, which is to open in December.

But bad weather Tuesday
in Washington, D.C., forced the crew to land the vintage craft in West
Mifflin to wait out the thunderstorms. Those storms extended the flying
life of the plane by one day. When it lands at Dulles, it will take on
a new life, as a relic of an earlier time when flying was elegant and
only for the wealthy.

The Clipper Flying
Cloud, as the plane was dubbed, has had an incredible life.
She was delivered to Pan American Airways in 1940, one of only 10 Stratoliners
produced, at a cost of $315,000. It was the first pressurized commercial
aircraft and was advertised as being able to fly above the weather.

The luxurious, silver
Stratoliner was one of the last pressurized airplanes produced with rectangular
windows. Later aircraft designers realized that rounded windows had more
structural integrity and could withstand the pressure of high altitudes.

The plane that landed
at the county airport started its flying life on a Caribbean route. At
the time, a one-way ticket on the Clipper Flying Cloud was $1,000, which
is the equivalent of $12,000 in todays dollars. Two years later,
it was taken over by the Army to fly officers to South America and London.

It returned to commercial
service on the round-trip route between Bermuda and New York City in 1946,
but was sold in 1954 to the Haitian air force where it was dedicated to
serving the dictator Francois Papa Doc Duvalier.

The Smithsonian acquired
the airplane in 1972. By that time, it had been bought and sold many times.
Boeing mechanics discovered it in 1991 at the Pima Air Museum in Tucson,
Ariz., where the Smithsonian was storing it. The interior had been gutted
and the engines had to be rebuilt.

There were cats
living in the wings, said Pat DeRoberts, of Olympia, Wash., a retired
Boeing engineer who helped rebuild the plane. The engines hadnt
been run in 25 years.

The mechanics restored
the engines and checked the structural integrity before the first test
flight in 1994, which ended because of a problem with the propellers.

The second test flight
ended when a bearing failed in the No. 4 engine.

It blew up on
us, DeRoberts said.

My first landing
was an engine-out landing, said Paul Leckman, 61, of Bothell, Wash.,
who is one of only three people in the world certified to fly the plane.

Leckman, a Boeing
test pilot, flew the plane on its last flight yesterday. DeRoberts was
his flight engineer.

In June 1994, the
plane flew to Seattle. It was moved in 1995 to the same hanger where it
was originally built. The restoration, done mostly by retired Boeing employees,
took six years and was completed in 2001. In March 2002, during a test
flight, the plane ran out of fuel and was ditched into Elliot Bay.

Boeing officials dont
say it ran out of gas; instead, explained company spokeswoman Cindy Wall,
they prefer to say there was too much air in the fuel tanks.

Boeing decided to
salvage the plane once again, and another restoration started in June
2002 and took a full year.

The plane is now as
it once was. A row of leather seats lines the left side. The opposite
side has private compartments with Pullman-style club chairs that can
be folded down into berths. The interior of the fuselage is covered in
fabric specially woven for the craft, which has maps of the world with
Pan Ams logo.

The cockpit features
skylight windows so the navigator can find his way by the stars using
a sextant. Even the original radio, that uses vacuum tubes, has been restored
to working order, though the crew now uses a modern radio that had to
be installed because the old one operated with a Morse code key.

We worked hard
on it, DeRoberts said. We did a lot of grunt work on it, shining
it up, repairing the seats, repairing the engine cowling.

When Leckler radioed
in to Corporate Air Tuesday at the Allegheny County Airport, he identified
the plane as a Boeing 307 and said he was 25 miles out and would need
gasoline and transportation for 15 people.

Dave Sestili, the
line service coordinator for Corporate Air, thought Leckler was kidding
about the plane.

When the Stratoliner
landed it was surrounded by mechanics who had never seen anything like
it in Allegheny County. The curiosity factor was still apparent yesterday
morning as airport workers walked around the plane and private pilots
stood at the terminal fence looking at the craft.

Then the engines roared
to life once again and the plane lifted off for the 90-minute flight to
Dulles, where it will remain grounded.